Responsibility needs to be taken on the hiring side. Some companies post jobs with no intent to hire [1]. 70% of hiring managers surveyed say this is a morally acceptable, 45% of hiring managers have said they’ve done it.
This increases the risk on applicants that their investment on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.
Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.
If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a conversation with them about the damage they are doing to your industry.
> The irony? I got a job offer before I even finished building it. More on that later
Nothing succeeds like success. If you are on n attempt, and you are geared up for what you will do for n+2, usually the problem surrenders its self on n.
I mean, it’s not like we’ve ever seen this with the agile movement /s.
I’ve gone through “agile transitions” in government contracting, at a high level it starts out with a high concept idea of reducing lead times and increasing productivity. Then directives get handed down through layers of management, the decision is made to adopt Scrum or SAFe™, that gets handed down to middle management, who tailor the process in ways that specifically benefit themselves, and you end up with waterfall done poorly and with extra steps™.
What will happen is that there will be very loose definitions of source code and flexible definitions timing when code is released. If an agency does not want to share, they’ll find a way to evade, and still check off the box.
Sure, but won't there also be some agencies who voluntarily implement sharing in the spirit of the law? And won't that be positive for them and their dept's reputation?
This is very well said and succinctly summarizes my frustrations with QA. My experience has been that non-technical staff in technical organizations create meetings to justify their existence. I’m curious if you have advice on how to shift non-technical QA towards adopting automated testing and fewer meetings.
Hi, senior SRE here who was a QA, then QA lead, then lead automation / devops engineer.
QA engineers with little coding experience should be given simple automation tasks with similar tests and documentation/ people to ask questions to. I.e. setup a pytest framework that has a few automated test examples, and then have them write similar tests. The automated tests are just TAC (tests as code) versions of the manual test cases they should already write, so they should have some idea of what they need to do, and then google / ChatGPT/ automation engineers should be able to help them start to translate that to code.
People with growth mindsets and ambitions will grow from the support and being given the chance to do the things, while some small number will balk and not want anything to do with it. You can lead a horse to water and all that.
We are in the early stages of something like this in my org. QA has been writing tests in some form for a while, and it’s mostly been at a self-led level. We have a senior engineer per-application responsible for tooling and guidance, and the QA testers have been learning Java/script (depending on the application, teams we don’t interface with are writing theirs in C# iirc). With the new year, we are starting a phased initiative to ramp up all of QA to be Software Engineers in Testing - each phase will teach and guide and impart the skills needed to be fully sufficient to write automation tests in tandem with engineers writing features.
It’s an interesting and bold initiative imo, as I’ve often worked at places that let QA do whatever felt best which is good from the standpoint of letting them work within their comfort zone, and it also means that testing will largely plateau. I haven’t seen a real push for automation _not_ come out of the engineering department personally (because I’m the one pushing it every time), though I know this place has at least done some work with various automation systems in the past.
I have personal experience with this in my professional career. Before Christmas break I had a big change, and there was fear. My org responded by increasing testing (regression testing, which increased overhead). This increased the risk that changes on dev would break changes on my branch (not a code merging way, but in a complex adaptive system way).
I responded to this risk by making a meeting. I presented our project schedule, and told my colleagues about their expectations, I.e. if they drop code style comments on the PRs they will be deferred to a future PR (and then ignored and never done).
What we needed is fine grained testing with better isolation between components. The problem is is that our management is at a high level, they don’t see meetings as a means to an end, they see meetings as a worthy goal in and of itself self to achieve. More meetings means more collaboration, means good. I’d love to see advice on how to lead technical changes with non-technical management.
This is PM propaganda. Deadlines help people is a huge double speak management fallacy. It may not be wrong in some contexts, but it’s very far from what I would call generally applicable advice.
I worked on a project in the defense industry where management gave us arbitrary deadlines with the expectation that bugs could be solved in 1-2 days. To solve any bugs in our system required a rearchitecting that would require two months, there was no way around that. The only thing you could employ otherwise were workarounds that would give you side effects. We got arbitrary deadlines put on us, but no go ahead to commit to real solutions. Implementing workarounds, then fixing the bugs caused by those workarounds in circles for a year. We passed most deadlines without consequence, and discovered all of them were fake. Rather than understand the problem we were solving and execute to real solutions, we were micromanaged by schedule people, and this wasted a lot of engineering time and taxpayer dollars. This was a consequence of the defense industry culture. It’s very top-down and hierarchical. Orders flow down without feedback. If there’s knowledge at the bottom, it’s never integrated.
> Putting challenging timeboxes on projects in a healthy environment can lead to serious innovation and creativity.
The author does concede that deadlines can be bad in toxic environments, but does not offer objective criteria for what is a healthy or toxic environment.
What’s missing from these Parkinson’s laws articles are what is actually happening in the time that is filled. We often hear criticisms of gold plating but that misses the point. The fact is that with any technical implementation, there is risk. What fills the time are risk mitigations. Things like if my api returns an error code, can I make my program fail gracefully. These things improve quality, they improve user experience, they are not understood or acknowledged by PMs and are completely ignored by schedule focused staff.
Risk is not modeled in the Iron Triangle plot in the article. Risk is not understood, or recognized by PMs. As a result, ICs are 100% responsible for managing it.
What makes a toxic environment? When PMs fail to take responsibility over their project. Whenever you’re having a conversation about schedule and deadlines, it’s not going to be informed unless you’re understanding your risk tolerance. Otherwise ICs are left guessing what’s actually necessary, and you get people who think throwing on arbitrary deadlines motivates people. It will waste your customers time and money.
> this article is really aimed at people who are trying to have a bit more empathy for the assholes they work with
That was a sad article. The model they presented was useful we’ll have two axis for classifying employees, one for how hard people work, and one for whether the work they do is technical or political.
What made it sad was how absolutely reductive the model is. The place he describes is not fun. We’ve all worked there. You either wait it out, or go elsewhere. Although it’s important to build empathy, you need something more for healthy workplace cultures.
With statements like these it’s important to take into account proportionality and scale.
Whereas a member of the public may have been aware of climate change after James Hanson’s congressional testimony in 1988, ExxonMobil had its own climate research division in the ‘70s and knew about the dangers of climate change at-least ten years prior [1]. They sat on these findings and in the ‘90s actively engaged in PR and misinformation campaigns to delay action on climate change. They have been incredibly successful at this and the US has no policies to limit fossil gas extraction or burning.
I am aware, and that behavior is despicable, but I still don’t believe that this puts all the responsibility for climate change on oil companies generally or Exxon specifically.
The public at large have known for centuries that burning fossil fuels creates locally systemically significant pollution, and we do it anyway. We have known for decades now that it creates globally systemically significant pollution, and still we burn it anyway.
A few thousand greedy, profiteering, unscrupulous oil bosses would not have gotten away with doing it had there not been a few billion consumers paying them to do it. At some point, the blame must also be treated as systemic.
What happens in the scenario where Exxon is found guilty and given the corporate death penalty that some have asked for? Their assets would be confiscated and passed to some new owner. The government maybe? Whoever gets them, will they shut them down? No, they’ll keep those wells pumping, under some new brand name, because the demand for oil is systemic.
If Exxon is culpable for paying a hacker to commit a crime on their behalf, then the population at large are culpable of paying Exxon to pump oil on our behalf.
I'd have much more sympathy for this point of view if Exxon and co had loudly shouted about the dangers of climate change from the rooftops and the public at large still ignored them.
They did the opposite of that, in fact, and continue to do. So I have no sympathy for any oil companies if they ever face any punishment. A vanishingly unlikely prospect by the way.
> I am aware, and that behavior is despicable, but I still don’t believe that this puts all the responsibility for climate change on oil companies generally or Exxon specifically.
They should pay, they knew what they were selling and were misleading people now we are in a critical situation because of their actions. Individuals can do only so much and most of the people don't even really grasp and understand the implications of their actions, but gets appalled when they do...
You can turn the problem in all directions, the manipulation of public opinion to freeze any attempt at reversing climate change is actually a crime against humanity...
>The government maybe? Whoever gets them, will they shut them down? No, they’ll keep those wells pumping, under some new brand name, because the demand for oil is systemic.
Not to mention a bunch of the biggest oil companies are already government owned:
First: I appreciate the overall tone of your comment. It's a polarizing subject, and I feel this is very much in good faith.
I think there's two important points you made that I'd like to address:
1. Failures to apply meaningful penalties / punishment to transnational corporations
2. Individual culpability for oil consumption
To start, I think it's worth looking at how punishments for corporate wrongdoings might look in a brighter world. Not having faith in the system is _completely_ understandable, and I think it can be easy to forget what it is we _do_ want after being shown what we _don't_ want over and over.
Off-the-cuff, I envision something like the forced closure and seizure of all Exxon assets by the federal government. These assets could be sold off to pay for the settlements of the multiple class-action lawsuits against Exxon focused on public health and environmental wrongdoing[1][2]. I'd love to see criminal charges for those at the top
There are past examples of companies doing wrong and being forced to close "with prejudice", or not being allowed to restructure into another entity with a different name. A famous example is the forced closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)[3]. Another is Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which was restructured into a public beneficiary trust that would administer payouts to "opioid creditors" or people who suffered from the opioid epidemic[4]. And hearteningly, there are also examples of executives facing jail time. Enron[5] is the most famous example, and though there are critiques that it wasn't far enough, Skilling was a fall guy, etc., it serves as a good reminder that even within our system today, there is already precedent. Theranos is another example of criminal proceedings against executives[6].
All this is to emphasize that though pessimism is understandable, optimism can help us push the system in the right direction, and doesn't have to mean having all the answers.
Now we can look at individual culpability.
I wanted to look at this point second because I think it becomes more approachable once we've seen what widespread change can look like. I don't have citations, or evidence to bring here. Just my own experience. I find it much easier to start taking personal responsibility when I know that there is some effort being made to offer me a mode of life where I don't induce second order demand for oil (i.e. I need to buy groceries, those groceries may come packaged in plastic). I find it much easier to take a freezing half-mile walk to the store when I see the companies inducing oil demand many orders of magnitude beyond what I'll ever use or need begin to face consequences.
That Intel board article was great. It named names, responsibilities, some degree of culpability.
There are org charts and paper trails for these corporations. Corporations aren't mechanical automatons. They are made of people that make decisions. Unfortunately, they are rich and influential people.
Between statute of limitations, limited liability corporations, fall guys, unlimited resourced lawyers, and a fundamentally corrupt judiciary when it comes to corporations, there's no justice for the legal immortal invincible personhoods that are corporations.
It is nuts that physical reality is subordinate to the law and even worse, the selective enforcement thereof, but that is the nature of this peculiar filter. What will probably kill humanity? Bureaucracy.
Climate Central has a model that can show how much more intense hurricanes are based on how much warmer the ocean is.
This is an advance for attribution science, which aims to show how much of a natural disaster is attributed to climate change.
In the future I expect a party, perhaps an insurance firm, or reinsurance firm sue oil companies for their role in accelerating climate change to pay for the cost of natural disasters.
> In the future I expect a party, perhaps an insurance firm, or reinsurance firm sue oil companies for their role in accelerating climate change to pay for the cost of natural disasters.
Why make something legal and build your entire society around it and then turn around and retroactively blame them for providing legal goods? Seems insane to me.
It's not what happened, though. Fossil fuel companies had studies about the impact of AGW since 60s, and yet decided to fund climate change denial. That's criminal.
But here we are talking about this recent advance in showing cause/effect. Are you saying the fossil fuel companies had this knowledge 60 years ago and scientists are just learning it now?
Fossil fuel companies, and scientists, had the knowledge that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels would warm the earth 60 years ago.
Here we are now talking about a specific example of someone doing some math and writing an article about it. This is not a "recent advance", it's a retrospective based on warming that has already happened.
Someone 60 years ago could have (and did!) predict "warming will cause stronger hurricanes, and here's about how much stronger they might get". This article is "here are some hurricanes that happened recently, and here is specifically how much stronger they were than they would have been, due to the warming over the last 60 years"
No. Fossil fuel companies and scientist knew the effects. What is new is attributing how much of the storms power is due to climate change. It's a new metric essentially.
To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.
> To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.
Doesn't the presence of legal penalties for an action make it even more desirable (for the perpetrator, from a purely practical point of view) to bury information about those actions and cover them up?
Because they’ve gone to great lengths to influence what is legal. Humanity should have more than a “we told you so”. It’ll also reduce more of this BS in future, when people act against all our interests with no repercussions, sailing super yachts on the ever-expanding waterline.
Right, we just blindly trusted the first things we heard on the subject, and everyone knows that's rational because humans never lie.
Remember: as long as you trust your government, trust the corporations, trust all the information you hear, especially from large and well-known institutions, you'll always be fine.
Never slow down, never stop to think, just keep buying, keep consuming, keep tuning into the same media sources, and NEVER EVER dare to question social consensus!
I get the sarcasm but I don't really understand who you're mocking. I guess people who foolishly followed the herd and bought a gas car in the 80s instead of doing their own research and inventing an electric one.
No one has time to verify/double check literally everything they're told. And if they did, they wouldn't have the time to learn everything that one would need to know to verify everything. It's impossible. Therefore, some level of trust is necessary: moreso for those who have less time/opportunity to learn and verify.
While I understand the sentiment, blaming ~everyone~ provides no value here, while blaming the institutions who actively misled the world might.
I didn’t want to. But my home was a mile+ away from anything and a terrible place to walk with no public transportation in large part thanks to the actions of oil and car companies
I couldn't help but notice in your profile that you literally created a site to find homes based on attributes that are important to you, with the first example being "transport."
Indeed! I grew up in a car dependent place and wanted to find one where it was easier to live without being so reliant on one. Same reason I moved to Europe, though Ireland was disappointing in this regard
Thats quite cynical, but more importantly, by not accepting as legitimate the so-called "consumer responsibility" angle you are missing half of the equation.
Already in this forum there more than enough people that will viciously defend their right to consume whatever they fancy with "their hard-earned money" and would cry "tyranny" if you suggest there is a limit after which their lifestyle becomes a danger to others.
The equation gets even more muddied if you also consider the responsibility of individuals as labor providers to the corporate entities that are responsible for environmental degradation. Again, people "got to pay the bills" etc.
Sure, there are bad people out there, prime suspects, clear villains. But its mostly bad systems.
I am not sure you are familiar with what the term consumer responsibility means in this context. It doesnt mean to rely on consumer's "good hearts" and conscience. Its a mechanism to attribute impact to final consumption, so that the costs of that impact are also priced to influence these consumers. So your neighbor would somehow pay for their mindless blowing (rather than the manufacturer or the fuel provider).
The comment to which I responded implied that this is unfair, that the corporate beneficiaries / polluters should "pay".
> I can cut my carbon footprint to the bone, and my neighbor will run their two-stroke leaf blower all day because they like the noise it makes.
Personally I reduced our currently measurable monthly CO2 emissions from ~350kg/month to ~15kg/month. They need a lot of (gas powered) leaf blowers to offset that. If thousands or millions of people do it, it'll make a difference. I'm aware of course that not everyone is in the financial position to do what we did. For a lot of people though it's a choice they could make if they're open to changing their lifestyle a little bit.
(I'm not saying our emissions are down to 15kg/month, but that's based on what I can currently measure, transportation, LNG, electricity, etc. Likely they are much higher of course but I gotta start somewhere)
Educating a person is materially different from getting them to act against their incentives. Doing so with a population is even more so.
The average American is overweight and doesn’t exercise. They are almost certainly aware they need to reduce their calorie intake and spend at least a couple of hours a week engaging in physical activity. Knowing you ought to change you behavior and actually doing it are completely different issues.
I actually happen to think that both are basically losing battles these days, but the underlying reasons aren’t the same.
> It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
Oh no, that’s just… why?
At least with a paper book you can give it away, sell it to a book reseller, or put it in one of those little lending library boxes people put in front of their houses. If nothing else, if it has no more value, you can recycle it for paper pulp.
I mean if you’re a publisher, hoping to cash in on people wanting to disconnect, and trying to evade the first sale doctrine, sure. That is a way to do it. But the environmental consequences are just bad. Maybe have the sleep screen list what books are on the device and make it repairable. At least make it possible to open, and replace the battery.
This increases the risk on applicants that their investment on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.
Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.
If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a conversation with them about the damage they are doing to your industry.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-listing-ghost-jobs-cbs...